Alleghany County, North Carolina / Whitehead / Air Bellows / Blue Ridge Mountains / mountain music / and so on. An open journal of one person in one place in one time.

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

DON'T WORRY - BE HAPPY

A warm, sunny day, 76 degrees, fluffy white clouds drift so slowly they're barely perceptible. Multiple shades of green everywhere I look outside. The green world, these mountains, taking stale air, making fresh air, our air filters beautiful to look at, good to burn in winter for heat, good for building our houses and everything else made of wood. Also good for keeping the water table up. As the deciduous trees that lose their leaves in the fall go away, so does our water.

We're not going to stop cutting down trees, so we're piping water to town from the river. In the back of my head I continually wonder what it is that's so blinding about the obvious. Like the problem with disoriented bees unable to find the hive that was thought to be cell phone signals. It didn't take long to get it that if the cell phones were, in fact, responsible for the demise of the honey bee, good-bye bees. End of subject. We never did get any more findings, one way or the other, on that subject. Nobody cared, or not enough cared to matter.

In this time of my life I've let go of concern over what other people do or don't do, what our government does or doesn't do. If it weren't for this, if it weren't for that, if only, if only. I've come to see, in myself anyway, that

grieving over the extinction of the polar bear doesn't do me any good and it sure doesn't do the polar bear any good. How do I accept it and say, Oh well, and retain access to compassion? I can't help but mourn the loss of the polar bear, and undoubtedly the penguin at the same time. But if I'm going to mourn everything that goes extinct, I'd never have a minute out of mourning. So where's the sense in mourning?

I can't change the forces that are heedlessly taking all of us with them. I find a certain satisfaction, however, that the architect who designed the Titanic sank with it. In the land where Mammon is holier than God, we end up with mountains of trash. They used to put it underground in massive pits, now they make mountains of trash with bulldozers. Hard times come, up go the yard sale tables full of stuff we wasted money on.

And the ocean, the world's sewer where barges of trash and ships offload their waste. All the nastiest rivers in the world flow into it. In films I see the Amazon River is now as muddy as the Mississippi. The Yellow River in China is mud. This is recent too. Last night I saw a Chinese film made in the 'social realism' period, 1950s, and the water in the river was clear. You never see clear water in a river in China now. Just like here. Just like Russia. Just like Europe, Africa, South America, Australia. Even though the New River is clear after it's not been raining awhile, it's loaded with nastiness too.

I used to believe it was men in charge of everything, men separated from the rest of the world by country club boundaries, men devoid of aesthetic senses, occupied with numbers every minute of every day. Then women started jumping into the arena. They're just like the men. No difference at all except for dresses and hairdos. So I tell myself I must adjust my own thinking if I'm not going to be aggravated all the time by collective willful refusal to see we're collectively in crisis. The Amazon is every day coming one giant step closer to the Sahara and they're putting more chainsaws in than they're taking out. It may already be irreversible.

Oceans are rising, most of our population lives on the coast. It won't rise in one tsunami and sweep everybody out to sea. It will creep up and then hurricanes will destroy cities and everybody will head for the hills. We think we've got a real estate crisis now, we're going to need all the water we can get, and our water is going away. Maybe in that time they'll do like Bermuda and paint the roofs with white lime and collect water in rain barrels, their only source of water.

I tell myself it must be in the me-first-others-last state of mind that is the mind of the western world. Yet in the east where the rule is others-first-me-last, it's the same. I haven't been able to find any one approach that would make a difference in the direction of poverty and death around the globe, the indifference of nearly everyone toward any people below themselves on the status ladder, unless we had a collective attitude change that happened everywhere at once. I think they would call that the Lord coming again. It would have to be something of at least that magnitude.

It looks like the next generation of people will be facing some serious dilemmas. But, you know what, we always are. Every day we're facing a serious dilemma, making money to pay expenses. Every time has its particular needs. Over the last not many years we needed to train an enormous number of computer technicians. It seems like everybody under 30 is a computer geek now. As the need arises so do the people to make the next thing work. We're changing all the time, we just don't know it very well until one's retirement ceases because the company went under. Then we notice.

What is it? Every day has its own evil? I don't have any business making assessments of what is bad or good where something like 3 billion people are concerned. I don't even have control over myself. I ask myself how I arrogantly assume if I figured it all out I could make it all right? Then what is right? I don't have a clue. In fact, I don't know what I'm talking about. When I reach this point is where I break out laughing at myself for putting so much energy into illusions. I'm not here to experience someone's life in Palestine. I've got all I can handle at Air Bellows, just me and three cats, and the cats are the least of it.

What can we do, but just do as we do, just keep on keepin on? Don't worry, be happy, is where I always come to when my mind starts trying to

make sense out of three billion dots, every one the center of the universe and all of them in motion.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense,up to that point it has not got a sense,its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

---PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

---BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Brace yourself. The American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying.

---Chris Hedges

Start learning to love by loving the people you cannot like. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the more you forget your self and when you forget yourself completely, you find God.

---Meher Baba

GO GREEN WITH BLUEGRASS.IT'S NATURAL.

---TIM WHITE, banjo the VWBoys

DEATH CANNOT HARM MEMORE THAN YOU HAVE HARMED ME,MY BELOVED LIFE.

---Louise Gluck, from her poem OCTOBER

THROW ENOUGH STONESAND YOU BUILD A WALL.

---Carole Roberts

STAY AWAY FROM IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

---Wiley Maxwell Jr

A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE.

---Man Ray

GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE.

---Albert Einstein

American old-time music quarterly

The beliefs and opinions of a person often constitute a very superficial layer of the human psyche. They do not have any integral relationship with the deeper psychic forces. They remain in one region of the mind without bringing about any radical changes in the core of personality, which determines the attitude to life.

---Meher Baba

Justice is what love looks like in public.

--- Cornell West

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

---Leo Tolstoy

The mountains don't lie to you; they stand for the things that don't change, that stay true to themselves. They've been around a hundred million years and they'll be around a good while more, I reckon. They keep you humble. They put you in your place.

An excellent catalog of music from the Central Blue Ridge

There are more love songs than anything else.If songs could make you do somethingwe'd all love one another.

---Frank Zappa

on playing a banjo:

WHEN YOU SCREW UPTRY TO COVER IT UPLIKE A CAT.

---Wiley Maxwell, Jr.

ACTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PRAYER.

---Dalai Lama

THE WHOLE SECRET LIES IN CONFUSING THE ENEMY SO HE CANNOT FATHOM OUR REAL INTENT.

Sun TzuThe Art of War

WE'LL KNOW OUR DISINFORMATIONPROGRAM IS COMPLETE WHENEVERYTHING THE AMERICAN PEOPLEBELIEVE IS FALSE.

---Wm Casey CIA Director 1981

In this unbroken intense booming symphony, suddenly there is the tinkling of a bell so faint that I almost think I am hearing things. It is like the trembling cry of a cicada on a late autumn night. It is so ephemeral, so delicate, so pitiful, yet it is so distinct and clear above the chaotic booming of the drum that it is unmistakable.